Novel ideas come from being present in your life

not the distraction portal in your hand

Sep 28, 2025

The things you see when you look up from your phone and gaze curiously into your own life !!!!!

For one of the first times in my life, I was having trouble sleeping and consistent nightmares for about a week. This is extremely unusual for me. I’ve always been blessed with easeful sleeps and rather pleasant dreams. Any time my dreams turn on me, it is usually a sign I need to face something I have been avoiding in my life.

The emotions I would wake up with were so intense that my first instinct was typically to reach for my phone, and scroll away whatever intensity was bubbling up inside of me. This would eventually turn into a little Pavlovian cue, where any time I felt off, I would reach for my adult pacifier next to me, the screen that would numb out whatever deep, dark emotion (or even the shallow, mildly unpleasant ones) that could be rising up in me, asking to be looked at.

As I was falling asleep, one of the nagging thoughts that would keep me up was my own awareness of the unsustainable nature with which I was using my phone. And how it was most definitely blocking me from figuring out what was keeping me up and infecting my consciousness at night.

This loop ceased with one especially tough night where it was clear to me that something needed to change. I spent the next day journalling, trying to tease out the emotional block I had been avoiding. With one simple, deep journal session—where my phone was not on-site, though my hand still found itself searching for it like a phantom limb I had grown accustomed to leaning on when I didn’t feel like being in the moment I was in—I was able to piece together what this block was, and move through it. One simple journal session was all it took to solve several consecutive nights of horrible sleep.

It really made me think: what the fuck are these things doing to our consciousness?

Since this nightmare-dense episode, I’ve had all the addictive apps on my phone blocked, and my phone mostly off my person and out of site. The waves of emotion that have come up and forced themselves into my awareness, rolling through me like waves, crashing onto the shore of my mind without the insulating safety blanket of my phone to orient me away from them, has been quite humbling.

The emotions I am processing do not always explain themselves to me; they do not always tell me what they represent or what they have arisen from or as a result of. But they do demand to be processed. They do demand to be felt. And as a dutiful steward of my consciousness, I have been feeling them. Fully. And it has left me truly humbled. Humbled by the amount that there is in me to feel when I am not pulling myself into a portal of distraction. A portal that reliably regulates me to any experience other than the one I’m having in that moment.

who needs to read this essay?

screens and dysregulation

Many people rightfully argue that screens can be used for your own good. Consume information you actually like! Learn about things you’re interested in! Read fun and interesting substack essays ;)! Take beautiful photos of your beautiful friends! Yes! All wonderful activities worth indulging in.

But these screens, ever so subtly, can become a very convenient tool of emotional numbing, dysregulation, and systemic distraction that takes us off our path and away from the opportunity to receive our inner signals. They are unbelievably effective and instantaneous portals into endless experiences that do not belong to us. Diverting us away from the natural course of our emotional flow, enabling us to postpone the inevitable but uncomfortable act of feeling our own (sometimes unpleasant!) feelings.

If you want to work with me 1:1 to gain clarity, face your blocks, identify your patterns and begin acting in seamless alignment with your values, apply here.

I know we all know this, but when you go through such a stark phase as I just have of using the emotional pacifier and then abandoning it, the contrast of what it is like to feel your emotions as they come up without a tool to divert your attention away vs. what it is like to persistently avoid them really is rather revelatory.

It made me wonder: what are the implications of most humans having done this for years now, with no end in sight unless you consciously opt out of it? They certainly can’t be good! It’s why we’re all yelling loudly into the void about things we have never personally experienced. Telling the stories of people we have never met. Commenting on the politics of places we have never been to or lived in, assuming we are the arbiters of what everyone else should say, think and do on those matters.

The internet has made everyone into an authority on some situation happening far away from their lives, and pretty well numb to what is actually happening right in front of them.

There was an interesting reflection I wrote in my notebook after one particularly distracting phone use episode, where I started taking myself down a mental path of this other person’s life and all the little decisions they had made that I would have hypothetically done differently… until I realized I had spent the better part of an hour thinking about someone’s life who I’ll never even speak to, and thought: what am I even doing here? The honest answer: distracting myself from the uncertainty in my own life, by playing God in someone else’s life. Someone’s life who not only am I not God in, but where I have literally no power to influence anything at all.

And herein lies the central vice of the screens, of social media, of the never-ending portals of distraction, into worlds that are not ours.

The Internet takes us away from real life.

Viciously, instantaneously, unconsciously. It takes us away from what we can control, into a massive sea of uncontrollable forces that lie far beyond us, beyond our direct circle, beyond anything our actions can tangibly, immediately impact. And it convinces us that we are somehow being responsible or righteous or noble for having informed ourselves about these stories that involve people we’ll never meet. When often all we are doing is shrugging off the responsibilities we have in our own life, to play God somewhere else. To tell everyone what we know best about. Or, to simply distract ourselves by stifling our own awareness with the stimulus of what is happening elsewhere so intensely that the world on the screen starts to feel more real than the one our feet are planted in.

how to have Good ideas

If you are someone who values truth, who values having your own ideas, who values your creative essence and power — there probably is not a more important relationship in your life than the one between you and your phone. Without intentional regulation, the screens rob you of your own creative power and the curiosity that can animate your own life. This essay is titled you have novel ideas by being present in your own life, because the ideas you have (and passionately espouse) from scrolling on the internet, are most often a reformulation of someone else’s ideas that they have made you a vessel for.

But if you want to be your own vessel, if you want to harness your own creative power for your own vision of what the world could / should be, then you have to limit the time you spend on these highly dysregulating devices and sit (or stand, or walk, or run, or swim, or dance, or do anything with your body really) presently in your own life. That is where your mind and your creative center become most active. That is where your emotions get to genuinely teach you. And that is where you tap into the fullness of your experience being a human, here on earth, breathing the air in front of you, living inside of the real world and outside of the little glowing rectangle that you are reading this off of.

Stop over-consuming other people’s ideas and start noticing and acting on your own with my online course: Creative Liberation.

So, let this be your cue. Stand up. Comment what you are about to DO in your real, human, offline life. Beyond this 2D glowing surface. Tell us how you are going to go feel alive. And let us feed off of each other’s willingness to exist, to think, to imagine, to live, to move, to ask, to feel, and to be present in our lives. To dream up our own ideas and have the strength, focus and will to actually act on them. To affect change in places where we have the capacity to do so. To talk about what we know and have experienced directly, instead of what we heard someone say on The Internet.

I’m hosting an in-person meet up in Europe!

I will be travelling to Europe in October, and am planning to do an in-person meet up in either Paris or Lisbon for my readers. If you’ll be close by and want to join, share your info here, and I’ll send you more details.